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I have been running one of the Chrome nightly builds on Leopard for several weeks and I am extremely impressed with its speed and stability. I have never had a single tab crash on me. I'm sure that people will complain about the lack of support for extensions compared to Firefox, and rightly so. But if you don't need many extensions, I highly recommend trying out Chrome.

I have been running one of the Chrome nightly builds on Leopard for several weeks and I am extremely impressed with its speed and stability. I have never had a single tab crash on me. I'm sure that people will complain about the lack of support for extensions compared to Firefox, and rightly so. But if you don't need many extensions, I highly recommend trying out Chrome.

Or if you want to not give google more information you can wait until SRWare* or someone else releases it without all the tracking (and google updater) crap in it for Liunx/OSX.
SRWare releases Chrome without the google-bits in it as Iron

I have also tried it for a while and it works great in Leopard. Has never crashed for me, but firefox on the other hand has crashed a lot.
Pages updates are a bit faster, sites like Facebook works better for some odd reason. They load a bit faster for me.
I also recomment trying out Chrome if you use a Mac or Linux.

In my limited testing with it this morning... I think it is very promising... but I won't quite be switching from Safari on Snow Leopard just yet.

My main gripe? Scrolling smoothness. It's a small thing... but the jarring scrolling of Chrome is enough to keep me on Safari.

Other than that I really like the tab tear off system (much better than Safari since you can _reattach_ tabs back into the main window) and the integrated search / location bar (which seems to be able to read my mind...).

Other than that they are very similar... can anyone spot big differences somewhere? I mean, these days, most browsers are the same. I used to use Firefox for the plugins... but now Firefox, Safari and Chrome all pretty much include the stuff I was using plugins for... so I go with Safari for how well integrated it is with OS X.

I am glad Google is building a good browser... it will keep everyone on their toes (especially since Microsoft has pretty much bowed out of the next-gen browser market with their unwillingness to implement standards in a timely fashion).

Whereas I will switch from FF unless I find something wrong that hasn't shown yet. The only thing I see wrong at the moment is that the "change fonts" preference is greyed out on Mac, and I want a bigger default font size. command+'+' will work for now, though.

There's nothing wrong with Lynx. It's just that you can get more from a graphical browser like Safari.

Chrome is quick. Or it appears quick. I guess it could all be smoke and mirrors, but what ultimately matters is the end user experience, and it seems faster to me. That's not something wrong with Firefox, it's something extra with Chrome.

Other than that I really like the tab tear off system (much better than Safari since you can _reattach_ tabs back into the main window) and the integrated search / location bar (which seems to be able to read my mind...).

Firefox does both of those quite nicely, does it not?

I use Firefox for the extensions, no doubt. But I also like its speed and stability (version 3 was the one that made the biggest difference, IIRC).

Some of the Firefox extensions I use are really handy to have. As I’m sure you’d expect, I use AdBlock Plus and couldn’t live without it. However, Download Statusbar, Video DownloadHelper, FireFTP, RefControl, Screengrab, Tab Mix Plus, and User Agent Switcher are some more extensions that I ha

Out of all of those plugins... the one I thought I would miss the most is Download Statusbar... but as it turns out Stacks mostly serve the same purpose. Being able to expand my Download Stack and see the progress of all of my currently downloading files (displayed as a moving progress bar _in_ the file icon itself no less!) mostly does the job that Download Statusbar used to...

The other thing that Statusbar was good for was double clicking files after they had finished downloading... so you didn't have to

Other than that I really like the tab tear off system (much better than Safari since you can _reattach_ tabs back into the main window) and the integrated search / location bar (which seems to be able to read my mind...).

Firefox does both of those quite nicely, does it not?

I didn't know that you could reattach tabs to Firefox. I always seemed to have trouble with it on OS X, but I did finally manage to do it.

The tab management is kind of weak on Firefox, anyway. With Safari, you can pull off the tab without e.g. restarting a Flash video. Not so with Firefox. Furthermore, Firefox always seems to create the new window in the "new window" position, rather than wherever I've dragged the mouse pointer. It's a minor annoyance, but it's there.

Another reason I like recent FF better is that it apparently respects the settings in ~/.fonts.conf, whereas google chrome (currently) seems to just ignore them. Since I can get much better rendering for some fonts (typically CJK fonts) by such tweaking, chrome looks uglier in comparison.

Also, chrome seems to steal keystrokes it shouldn't -- in particular in text-boxes, if you have gtk's "emacs bindings" mode on, ^N should just move to the next line; in FF it does, but google steals that for its global "n

It's definitely smoother. However since you always see tab bars with Chrome, that's possibly one reason why reattachment is easier. Actually, without dragging the tab specifically, you might reattach when you didn't mean to just while you're reorganizing your windows.

much better than Safari since you can _reattach_ tabs back into the main window

Unless I am misunderstanding you, this is possible in Safari (though potentially inelegant). Tabs can be dragged to, from and between any two tabbed windows. If you have only a single document window, though (i.e. one or no tabs showing, depending on your prefs setting), you must first induce the display of a new tab before being able to drag the principal document.

I am glad Google is building a good browser... it will keep everyone on their toes (especially since Microsoft has pretty much bowed out of the next-gen browser market with their unwillingness to implement standards in a timely fashion).

What I find interesting is just how rapidly this is happening! For our intranet-style application, we've pretty much dropped support for IE altogether, telling our customers to use Firefox, Safari, or Chrome - pretty much "anything but IE". We just write standards-compliant

Beware that the first time you run Chrome, it will install their Keystone auto-update facility, with which Google feels free to update whatever they want, whenever they want and however they want. Even when you're not running the browser, as the Keystone agent will launch itself automatically at system boot.

You make it sound evil. Most people don't want to be nagged with constant update reminders. In fact, most people will ignore those reminders, leaving them vulnerable to security exploits. Hence, Google has built an updater which can automatically install updates in the background. Remarkably, it manages to do this without ever asking you to reboot or even to restart the program being updated, which cannot be said of any other software updater I've ever seen.

The advantage of googles is that you can use 1 updater for every google product.
Not that it makes it a good thing.
What they should do is install an updater and have each one of their products call that updater to run while you are using a google app.
That way it's not running when no google products are open. Although in my case there is always at least one google product running.

My that logic my windows box with apps from 50 apps from 47 different companies should have 47 different background services running looking for updates, and that should be fine since at least it isn't 50?

Windows needs a package manager, which apps can register themselves with. On linux, apps shouldn't be downloading updates at all unless users OK it - that is the distro's job.

Google does the same thing with their android SDK now. Why is it that every application needs its own package manager now?

Hey, i'm not saying a package manager is not a good idea (which is what chrome does on ubuntu, it adds to your apt sources)
I'm just saying it's better to have a application for all your google apps, then each app check for it's own updates. Its even better if that app doesn't run as a daemon, but runs only when you open a google application.

Google's Keystone agent launchd object resides at ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.agent on OS X. You can remove this file, but I assume Chrome will re-create it. Open it up with TextEdit and change the ProgramArguments string to "/dev/null" and you're done.

I like being up to date, but I do not like unchecking "Automatically check for updates" during the install and still having an updater app run at boot time. Why can't the apps (chrome, picasa) just check themselves when they run like firefox? Why do I need yest another process always running to do it?

I just installed the beta from google.com and it installed an entry in/etc/crond.daily. The comments say it only reactivates the repository after dist-upgrades disable it. I.E. intrepid->jaunty From a quick read of the script that is what it does.

The OP might not be completely wrong, according to a dpkg-query -L google-chrome-beta it installs some stuff to/etc/cron.daily/google-chrome which apparently adds an extra source to your apt sources then updates google chrome based on some settings in your/etc/default/google-chrome. It also adds the source to/etc/apt/sources.list.d. Seems a bit invasive to me.

Adding its favored repository to your package sources is still several stops short of auto-updating. A bit invasive, perhaps, but hardly what the fear-mongering suggested. I wonder what happens if you run dpkg-reconfigure on the package? If the cron job is only installed automatically when you use default priority (and running dpkg-reconfigure manually automatically switches to low), then I might even have to concede that they did it right.

If you have a mac, it may install a launchd agent at/Library/LaunchAgents/com.google.keystone.root.agent, which runs "/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/Resources/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent -runMode ifneeded" on every start up and hourly.

I believe you can shut this behavior off by deleting the file or adding this after "<dict>":

Oh, and I also discovered a file at/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist, which runs "/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/MacOS/GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon" and can be disabled in the same manner described above.

(BTW-- I have a few google apps including Google Earth installed, so I'm not sure which installed what. But this is what I've found so far...)

Oh, and I also discovered a file at/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.google.keystone.daemon.plist, which runs "/Library/Google/GoogleSoftwareUpdate/GoogleSoftwareUpdate.bundle/Contents/MacOS/GoogleSoftwareUpdateDaemon" and can be disabled in the same manner described above.

(BTW-- I have a few google apps including Google Earth installed, so I'm not sure which installed what. But this is what I've found so far...)

I just installed Chrome on my MacBook Air, which doesn't have Google Earth installed... and I don't have that file on my system.

I've poked around all the various and sundry locations used by cron, anacron, and launchd - nothing. So I'm guessing Google Earth was the culprit in your case - the Chrome drag-and-drop install looks clean.

I am personally not deeply troubled by this behavior. I like having the latest version of Chrome running on my machine. That being said, they really should let users opt out (or, better yet, make it an opt-in on first launch) of automatic updates.
And, to my knowledge the keystone auto updating is the behavior on Mac and Windows. In Linux, it just uses apt. I don't have any issue with the Linux behavior, except that they might add a dialog informing the user that they're modifying/etc/apt/sources.list

The main big issue, is how the company doesn't have an official policy towards local app development.

When it comes to Google's web apps, you can expect AJAX, DHTML, clean and simple look, etc. OTOH, they local apps all look developed by different companies. They are developing apps in.net (which doesn't make any sense considering where google is standing right now, specially towards microsoft). Their so called "ports" are pathetic. All they do is recompile their apps with the WINE libs. Picasa is an exampl

I agree that Google's non-web app development record is spotty. But in fairness Google didn't write most of the apps that you're complaining about. They came from other companies as the result of purchases. Some apps, like Google Earth, were already written in Qt and thus ported easily. Other apps not so easy to port. Google only offered Picasa on Wine because there was some demand for a linux version (not enough to warrant a native port by the original company, obviously) and that was the best way to

They are developing apps in.net (which doesn't make any sense considering where google is standing right now, specially towards microsoft).

Given the present anti-trust climate for Microsoft, I'm certain Google is safe from any encroachment on this side. They just have to shout "vendor lock-in! monopoly abuse!" if something threatening ever happens, and MS knows it.

Chrome uses ClickOnce installation, but it's not a.NET technology (though it's normally mostly used with.NET applications, and was designed with them in mind). And, of course, "written in Visual Studio" is a meaningless metric, as VS is an extensible multi-language IDE just as Eclipse is, and offers C++ support out of the box; so a project created in VS does not imply a.NET dependency.

Anything designed with, for, near, while talking about, or in any other way related to any microsoft technology is worthless. Visual Studio is not an extensible IDE, it's a piece of shit used only by crappy programmers.

Most games (naturally, most target Windows, if that comes as a surprise to you) are compiled using Visual C++, and Visual Studio is commonly used as an IDE. Is John Carmack a crappy programmer? 'cause id Tech engines and the games built on them are developed in VS and built with VC++...

But we disgress. Your original claim was that Google uses.NET for development, and it's somehow bad. Disregarding the latter claim, and only focusing on the former, you failed to prove it, or at least find any references hin

Can't say why I would use this. If we get to the point where google is not longer standard compliant, and will not work equally well with any standard complete browser, then much of why I use google will be moot. Already the lame google definitions require me to use another service. In any case, I stopped using google apps when it became difficult to get to my free account.

Sure, it might be cool on MS Windows, where IE really sucks and there is not free widely used stripped down browser, but on OS X we

It didn't take very long at all for me to grow dependent on the multitouch gestures in Firefox. Why in the world does WebKit not support the hardware on new Macbooks as well as Firefox? Three-finger swipe (back/forward and top/bottom of the page) and pinch-to-zoom are incredibly useful.

This one's a show-stopper for me (and, I suspect, others). Chrome offers to save your passwords but gives absolutely no protection on the saved password database. The discussion threads I've seen about this suggest that the Chrome devs don't even understand why this is such a serious problem. Chrome has a lot to like, but I'll be sticking to Firefox for now.

I'm not a big fan of their comments either, but I do think that their opinions on privacy and their actions on them are two different things. In my view they haven't crossed into the evil camp, and still have a better record with peoples' privacy than most companies. As always, we should keep an eye on them...

This is nice in theory, but in practice it has very serious security & management implications. You better don't allow programs to replace its code when called from a normal user, it creates a hell to support.

Like mister_playboy, I really don't consider "auto update" a feature. I uninstalled Chrome and installed SRWare Iron instead because I do not want some braindead Google Update service running constantly.

But, Iron also removes the browser's unique identifier and provides a proper installer (Chrome will only install per-user, in their profile).

If you're thinking about Chrome, get Iron [srware.net] instead. It supports AdBlock [adsweep.org].

Hey -- I use SRWare Iron, too. However, I've also got Chrome installed -- I like the auto-updating. Give me that in Iron, and I'll uninstall Chrome. I'll even get my relatives to use it!

As is, however, I can't in any confidence give them Iron -- if so, the next time I happen to check their computers, a year from now, they'll still be running the same version, even though many updates and security fixes might have been released by SRWare since then.

On my computer, Chrome just auto-updated today to 4.0.239.30(Windows Version) and in the "new tab" display, it advertises at the bottom that extensions are now available. No reliable ad-blocking solution yet(just a couple with dodgy reviews), but I imagine its only a matter of time. There was one specifically to remove the ads on Facebook profiles, which does seem to work quite well so far.

If there were some way to get a version of google news that only links to sites without obnoxious flashing ads, I would be very interested. Right now, it's simply too much work to find which of the 50+ articles on some subject don't have animated ads, so I just read the first one. With adblock enabled.

It would be nice to specify the level of advertising you are willing to endure in google's search options: none, text only, still pictures, animated pictures, crap that covers the text until you click on it, a

Or just don't go to sites that have advertisements you don't want to see. That seems a bit more fair than using resources of a site you clearly want to visit while denying them income...

The only one denying the website income is the website programmer. It is their responsibility to decide whether or not to hand out web pages willy nilly. If they don't think it is worth the effort of denying access to people who block advertisements, then that is clearly their decision to make.

Then as soon as you see those flash adverts, leave the site, and don't come back. If everyone with AdBlock did that, then the flash adverts would go away, as alternate non-annoying revenue streams are found. You are perpetuating the situation, and rather selfishly at that.

I prefer not to use adblock extensions, personally. When a site crosses the line and starts getting in my face with talking / content-covering ads... say with close button trick-throughs... I pull up my activity menu in Safari (there are analogs for other browsers, or you can just comb the source code), and I just nuke the offending ad servers in my hosts file.

I've found that only a small percentage of the ad servers out there carry the nasty stuff (I define nasty as making noise without my consent or cover

I'd used AdSweep in its very early days, and I ran into some weird issues, like it would chop off the first few letters of every ad on a local classified ad site(http://www.unclehenrys.com). I just tested it, and it still appears to do this...thankfully, I don't use that particular site as often any more.

Yeah, I've been using Chromium for a few months... unfortunately, only to play MafiaWars on Facebook.

It's much, much faster than Firefox at that task, though... I can click on a button 10 times in succession, and it'll register maybe 8 of them and come back with the results. Under Firefox, it would just sit there and register 1 click and wait until it got a response from the server before registering the next.

More legitimately, I've found it runs pretty well on my eeebuntu netbook, and I pretty much use i

It's mostly been ok, but I'm glad to see something officially from Google as "Chrome" rather than Chromium, if only to get off of the daily binaries and to something a bit more long term. Chromium has been the fastest browser out there for Linux in my testing, but at least twice when I updated my system (which included Chromium updates since they're daily) it had serious issues. Once it was crashing and another time anything with moving graphics were corrupting when the screen was scrolled. I ended up go

I've been using Chromium on Gentoo for about a week. It's generally stable and definitely feels faster and more responsive than Firefox. The proof-of-concept toys over at Chrome Experiments [chromeexperiments.com] are worth checking out. A lot of them work in Firefox too, but Chrome's speed advantage is more obvious. It's a shame Chrome can't do for Flash what it does for javascript. I do miss extensions like NoScript, NukeAnything, and VideoDownloader. Chrome is extendable though and I expect to see their equivalents in Chr

I used the PPA for a while, but it tracks HEAD a bit too closely for my liking. The last couple of builds have had some graphical corruption that make going back to a previous version necessary for me.
The official unstable version doesn't track HEAD nearly as closely, and contains the google branding (which, I don't really care about). I expect the beta version will be even more stable.

People who don't want to hand-edit anything can also use Ubuntu Tweak [ubuntu-tweak.com], which has a nice little checkbox you can click for Chrome, in addition to many other nice applications like the OpenShot [openshotvideo.com] video editor.

Reasons:1. Because Safari after a few hours of use consumes a couple Gigs of RAM even if you close every window. Chrome does not. 250GB for me for the parent process plus whatever tabs i still have open.

2. Because Safari loves to crash, especially when running in 64-bit mode on Snow.

3. Because Safari uses the retarded dialog box to offer to save passwords, before you're sure you've entered the right password, unlike Chrome and Firefox 3 who present a "ribbon" after you log in offering to save it.